Photon correlation microscopy of quantum matter
摘要
Light and matter share fundamental statistical properties, yet the experimental probes of quantum optics and many-body physics have largely evolved along separate trajectories. While many-body physics explores emergent collective phenomena, quantum optics has refined the measurement of correlations between individual photons. Here, we introduce photon correlation microscopy (PCM) - which bridges the two domains by leveraging correlations of emitted light to probe the correlations in quantum matter at mesoscopic scales. We demonstrate this approach using a one-dimensional (1D) ensemble of dipolar excitons confined at a lateral monolayer MoSe-WSe heterojunction. We use gate-defined potentials to confine the 1D excitons to a mesoscopic lengthscale to enhance the visibility of matter correlations in the emitted photon field. Power-dependent spectroscopy reveals a transition from a compressible to an incompressible phase, signaled by the simultaneous saturation of the emission intensity and energy blueshift, which is supported by numerical simulations. Through this crossover, photon correlation measurements show a striking evolution from bunching at low densities to antibunching at high densities. This constitutes a many-body blockade of photon emission emerging directly from a number-stabilized state, driven by collective dipolar repulsion. Our results establish PCM as a powerful probe of many-body physics through the lens of quantum optics, extensible to a broad class of correlated electronic phases, while pointing toward a route to generating non-classical light through many-body correlations.
引用
@article{arxiv.2605.28623,
title = {Photon correlation microscopy of quantum matter},
author = {Elie Vandoolaeghe and Iñigo Lasheras and Chirag Vaswani and Sampriti Saha and Purbasha Ray and Takashi Taniguchi and Kenji Watanabe and Prasana Sahoo and Nicolò Defenu and Thibault Chervy and Puneet A. Murthy},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.28623},
year = {2026}
}